← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#793: PAN Communications CMO Mark Nardone on 2026 predictions and staying ahead of GEO
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The agile brand.
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Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in. What if the foundation of your digital strategy, your corporate website, is becoming less important than the conversations happening about your brand in places you don't control? Control agility requires a fundamental shift in mindset, moving beyond just broadcasting your message on own channels to actively shaping the narrative across an entire ecosystem you don't fully control. Today we're going to talk about how generative AI is creating a new layer between your brand and your customers, changing how they discover information and what they trust. We'll explore the surprising new balance of power between owned media and earned media and what it means for your primary your content and SEO strategies moving forward. Tell me discuss this topic. I'd like to welcome back to the show Mark Nardoni, CMO at pan. Mark, welcome back.
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Hey Greg, always a pleasure. Enjoy. Enjoy these conversations that we typically have here.
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Yeah, yeah, love. I tend to have you on in the beginning of the year. Kind of a good kickoff to the new year and what to expect. For those that might have missed one of our previous conversations, though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at panel? Sure.
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You know, I've been at Pan since the beginning, so think about 1995. That's about 31 years old, pretty much going on 32. Potentially been serving as the Chief Marketing Officer for the brand over the last several years. I think what's interesting right now is what we're seeing from a global standpoint from a size of growth perspective, that kind of puts a little bit of a different challenge on my role moving forward because of some of the moves we've made as an agency. But I think when you look at what's happening with the convergence of marketing and comms in the world of AI, it's definitely starting to challenge agencies and brands in a particular way. And I look at it more from an opportunistic standpoint rather than something that's more of an uphill battle. So I'm excited to get into this conversation because we're seeing a lot of things across our client base and in the industry that I think will help your listeners kind of get a better sense of what we're doing. And one other thing I just want to mention, Greg, is I really want to treat this conversation to help simplify. I don't want to overwhelm. I feel like there's so much noise out there right now on AI. I feel there's 900 different ways brands should be able to tackle this. So hopefully we kind of drill into a few key points. Your listeners kind of get some good value out of it from a takeaway standpoint, because I just don't, I just don't want to complicate the situation any further. There's just way too much noise out there right now on the subject. So that's my biggest goal for our conversation today.
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Yeah, yeah. No, I like that. And to your point, with so much changing, there's also, I feel like a lot of us are just trying to figure out some of these answers. And to your other point, I think there's rarely ever one answer to all of these things. But yeah, let's dive in. And I want to start with so Pen recently released a report that has a rather startling statistic that 44% of ChatGPT links come from PR influenced sources, while only 30% come from corporate websites. So from a strategic standpoint, what does this tell you about where a CMO should be placing their focus, their budget, all of that over the months to come?
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I think brand's going to be really important. I think from a visibility standpoint, heading into 2026, most of the marketers that I'm talking to are kind of reallocating budget, more up funnel. So maybe top of and into middle. And you know, as an agency, we're a brand to demand agency. So everything is centered in and around content and PR and storytelling and how we try to connect the brand to demand channels are really, really important for us and for our clients. So we're seeing kind of a redirect up funnel a little bit. We're also seeing obviously the pressures that, you know, the compressed journey is having on most of the buyers coming in. And so we're seeing that some of those signals we've got to look for and some of the ways that they should be looking inside of the evidence side of the ecosystem. You know, we're seeing a big play around analyst Relations and the validation of the analyst and influencer component inside of marketing. So that's one area the marketers probably have to kind of maybe take a triple take on because that investment is yielding great influence inside of LLMs. I think customers, the validation of the voice of the customer. You and I have talked because your, your kind of CX expertise is right in line with this. I think over the last few years we've always had customer at the forefront of our conversations. I think now it's more from a proof point, you know, it's getting into more of the review sites. It's how are your customers advocating for you inside of communities out there that you might not be participating in, but you have some sense of visibility. And I think now more than ever, executives can't avoid communications and public relations. I think that thought leadership level at the, at the executive in C suite is really, really critical to building brand equity out there. And if they feel like they can just set it and let it go, they're sadly mistaken. They have to have an authentic voice. They have to be consistent. They, they don't have to be overwhelming, Greg. They just have to be consistent in their voice because that knowledge and that trust helps validate why they're showing up at a point that they're coming into the, into the equation and into the conversation.
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Yeah, and I want to, I want to key on something that you just touched on, which is that, you know, I think there's some ways of thinking of just by sheer volume, you're going to like overwhelm Google or some of these other things. And what I've seen, at least it seems like you're, you're saying something similarly is it's definitely less about volume than it is about quality. Is that, is that Safe to say?
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100%. I think if you look at, you know, some of the takeaways we've seen in the last 12 or 18 months. Right. I mean obviously AI has equipped marketing marketers and brands with the ability to kind of move at speed and pace. I think sometimes that actually sacrifices brand credibility because I think brands and teams might become overwhelmed with pace because they can do it maybe a little bit easier. And in our world, kind of the augmentation of human with content is really, really important. And that allows you to slow down, digest and make sure story is connected. And sometimes when content becomes overwhelming or there's pressures internally to externally to keep up with some type of velocity, brand gets sacrificed. And what we're saying is, nah, you gotta make sure your brand is connected. Your message and narrative is making sense. It's being equipped with answered first approaches rather than some of the other kind of noise that brands might be accustomed to in years past. You know, I think it also is just a huge shift in how the buyer is experiencing brands, and I think it's getting brands to really reflect differently on how they're communicating their story externally.
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Yeah, I mean, I think another, another part of this is just, you know, I think you briefly mentioned, you know, convergence of, of different things. But, you know, to me, this, you know, if it's less about volume, it's more about quality. There's. There's also another part of this which is, you know, integrated marketing is a term most are probably familiar with. But, you know, now, now we're kind of thinking about, you know, pr, comms, digital marketing, and how all of this stuff to, to what you were just saying, how do we tell the story in that way that's kind of across all of these things? And I also wonder, you know, if that also kind of mirrors, you know, how pan approaches things as, as. Well, maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
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Yeah, I think you're familiar with us because we've had so many great conversations in past, on, on your podcast that we started down the path of integrated because back when we were moving the agency and evolving it, including PR and into other marketing disciplines, integrated was a big play for us. And at that time, it was the convergence of skill set. How do you take social and earned and demand, and how do you integrate them? Drop the silos and make sure that they're running fluidly. Today, it's like you look at it and PR has always owned credibility, marketing owns pipeline. But those functions are definitely coming together to support each other and complement each other more consistently. So the, So I look at it and say the silos are collapsed. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that pr. Of course, maybe I'm a little biased because I've worked and run an agency for 30 something years here at the firm. But like, it's always had a challenge to create credibility versus maybe some of the other marketing disciplines. And I think now AI and LLMs and discoverability has turned that upside down. It has allowed earned media and owned media to again collapse and converge and become a really strong foundation on how that story moves. Now, some of that, Greg, may be C suite driven, obviously, but, but I'll tell you right now, I've had conversations in the last few weeks where it's board Level conversations. We're talking to brands and prospects out there and they're like, we're like, hey, we should be doing an AI audit for you. We need to figure out kind of from a query and a prompt how you're showing up, you know, what that conversation looks like. Why are the buyers seeking you out in the first place? And they're coming back and saying, you've got to do that. My board will eat this up. Imagine that. Right, right, right. Board going to eat this up. So now, because the accessibility of all of this is at the fingertips for the board, they can go in and do their own prompts and act like marketers.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And that's kind of like a great opportunity to continue to validate and build credibility and a scary, right? Scary opportunity. So there's a lot in what I just mentioned to you, but again, their silos are dropping and it, and it has a lot to do with the ecosystem of influencers inside of the brand.
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I, I think fortunately, education still has to happen internally. You have to be your best advocates and champions and we have a golden opportunity to kind of leverage a lot of that visibility and discoverability into that and moving, moving the value points up into board level, C suite level. So it's like when you think about the traditional SEO that boards and C suites might be used to and the traffic patterns and the blue links and everything else that we're always pretty much grew up in, I feel like, you know, this level is all about interpretability and it's like, how do you as a brand ensure that you've got strong visibility in what's happening? Clarity, consistency, authority, signals. So expert point of views, really, really important. Consistent narrative across channel. Greg, I can't tell you how important this happens to be because you find a gap amongst your story across channels and believe it or not, LLMs will kind of ding you on the fact that that story, that tone is a little bit different, may kind of like back, back off from some of that. So I feel like making sure the narrative is 100% crisp is important. But also when we get to the website side of things, that journey, although is really, really baked because the discoverability for the new buyer right now, they're so equipped by the time they hit it, if you do not have right message, right story on website as well, whether they're valued landing pages or the areas that you want that experience driven to, you're going to have a disconnected buyer and they're gone. They're going to the next brand that tells a better story and obviously, you know, structured content. That's what I'm kind of getting at. You got to make sure you have structured content. It's got to be answer first model. It cannot be old school marketing jargon because you'll get dinged and penalized specific to how you're showing up across some of these, some of these kind of conversations and discoverability options.
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Yeah, and I mean in this, in this scenario then it sounds like the, the old school, like volume, you know, let's just throw a bunch of stuff out there for Google and, and search engines to pick up. Is it's almost a liability. Right. Because to your point, if, if there's, you know, 10% of that is inaccurate or, or something like that, it's, it's, you're, you're going to get dinged in that way. So it's like, it is, it is a pretty radical change from traditional, you know, the, you know, SEO was the thing that came before this. Right. So it's like, it's kind of a change to the, that approach. Like, do you think brands are ready for this? Or like, how much, how much change will this take from a mindset standpoint?
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I mean, I don't know if it's so much of a change rather than a discipline. Okay. Like, you know, I feel like brands have always played, you know, especially in the last four or five years, you know, content's been critical. Channel optimization has been essential to the success of a brand. You know, I think now the script flips a little to trust reputation. I think that now becomes like common ground and it always has been, Greg. But now it's kind of like, how are you moving influence in your content? How are you showing really great authority across earned media influencer analyst relations? How are you showing up in reviews? Are you working with your customers to be your strongest advocates? Like, those things have always been part of our playbook, Greg. But they're now talking about you don't need velocity, you just need kind of like sustainability in that sense. You know, like, don't go, don't think about, you know, 12, 15 different campaigns in a calendar year. Why not think of two or three and just do them friggin exceptionally well and the repetitiveness and the velocity and the sentiment will take care of itself. Yeah.
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Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I mean, so by that token, maybe it's kind of an evolution of, you know, search engines have been getting smarter over time too. So maybe it's the way you described it. It's almost like the next kind of evolutionary step and just great content. I mean, we always knew content was important, right? But I guess the value of better, not more, right?
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Yeah, yeah. Clarity, like the value of clarity that I said when I started off in the beginning, I'm like, I just want to start simplifying these conversations with whoever's out there looking to kind of learn and continue to evolve as a marketer. Like many isn't actually great. Like, you know, many is not good. Like, it's like, it's okay to do a few things just really freaking great. Like, and it's okay that you don't have to check off 12 things to do in your marketing team. Like just like clarity is so important and consistency is so important because other than that you will have a huge gap in your authority signals.
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Yeah, yeah. So I want to also talk about, you know, how do we, how do we measure this? And we're measuring influence on, on, on customers and purchases, of course. But we're also measuring influence on third party platforms. Right. To make sure that they're, they're recognizing our authority and things like that. How do you advise clients to measure roi? Investing in, in some of these things to influence these, you know, kind of the new, the new way of doing things.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good question. And, and hot topic right now. I mean absolutely red hot topic. Cross our client base and all the conversations we're having. It's like the evolution of measurement and how we look at some of these things. You could start from, you know, obviously we're shifting from the, the reach of everything to the recognition we're starting to see how are you being interpreted out there in the LLMs. How does that weigh against the traditional share a voice side of things with making sure that message pull through is kind of landing in the right way consistently. Right. We go back to that word. Consistent, consistent clarity. Really important. So share of influence, share of model across earned analysts, reviews, all really, really important. I think visibility benchmarks, I think marketers have to start to look at what those visibility benchmarks look like in the world that AI prompts, monitoring citations. How are you weighting those metrics from an authority standpoint across certain things. We talked a little bit about reviews and the velocity of reviews and the sentiment coming out of reviews. G2 is a great example of that. Right. I mean that platform for. They just are in a golden moment right now because they have such credibility on the review side of things. Those are all kind of to me really, really important. But I go back to what's happening with your conversation. How are you showing up? You know, are you starting everything off with a question or are you changing finally your marketing strategy to be to solve with answers. Users do not have the patience, buyers do not have the patience to funnel through all of these overviews if you're not serving up exactly what they're looking for. And it's probably not going to be exact. Right. But at least close enough that continues them along their journey. And so answer LED content consistent. Really, really important. And there's gotta be great ways to measure that. So we tie it all to what we call now more from a AI driven visibility metrics platform and we're doing a lot of that in a lot of the platforms we have on panoptics, which is our branded platform.
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Yeah, yeah, I love it. So you're a regular guest here, as as mentioned at the top of the show, and I always like to get your predictions and what, what CMOs should be looking for. So looking ahead to the, the rest of the year, you know, how do you see, you know, things changing, evolving, or, you know, what, what should CMOS be looking out for?
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Yeah, yeah. You know, I always like these questions that you throw at me, these curveballs.
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That you throw at me.
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You know, I, I, I can't stress enough the shift that we're seeing right now as marketers. I mean, what a time. I, I think we say this every time. What a time to be a marketer right now. Like, boy, like the, the ability to kind of like continue to evolve and learn. Like it's this shift in the experience is the biggest we've seen since, in my opinion, the Internet, no question about it from an AI standpoint, you know, we're moving from education, we're going more into the validation side of things. Buyer journeys are being assisted by AI across the board. The funnel, as we talked about, is pretty compressed. It's nonlinear. Those present unbelievable opportunities from an executive standpoint. So here's what I think, kind of looks at certain things. There's no wrong doors right now. Like, the story has to be identical across everywhere. I think one of the biggest areas you'll see from a prediction standpoint is content has to continue to be identical, consistent storytelling. Trust becoming the new operating system for growth, really, really important in our opinion. We feel like it's started to replace Velocity because trust is so, so important. Expertise from a content standpoint, really, really important. I think brands, this is nothing new. This is no crazy prediction. It's more of, boy, are we getting back to the fundamentals to some degree. And I think that's pretty welcoming for your listeners as they look forward to be like, you know, dust off some of those things and get back to some of the basics and the foundations that make your brand build the equity up in market that deserves the recognition. And the last thing is trial period is over. Greg, I think it's now getting to the point where you have to operationalize these inside of your marketing department. I think a lot of brands tried a lot of stuff in 2025. I think 26 now is okay. Let's settle in on a few key operational processes that's going to make our brand stand out and the buyer select us maybe quicker than the competitor they're looking at.
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Yeah, yeah. And maybe, maybe the in inverse question here. But you know, are there any, you know, entrenched beliefs or common practices that either should be or you think will be kind of obsolete by, by year's end?
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100%. Yeah, I, I definitely, we talked about it a couple times right now. Content, the belief that content velocity wins, that's gone. You know, Gen AI has neutralized volume as a competitive advantage. It wins now with depth and proof and clarity and expertise and tight alignment across channel, it's just like it amplifies consistency and filters out the disconnect and clutter. And that is so important for listeners to kind of understand, you know, don't. Gone are the days that the C suite and the, and the other influences inside of the brand are putting pressure on you on these vanity metrics because you put out 70 pieces of content in a month and you. No, no, no, no. Those are gone. It kind of gets back to, you know, why we're at right now. And I think that LLMs have provided us a wonderful opportunity to help educate the buyer a bit more at a critical point of decision and not overwhelm them. And I think marketers in years past have flooded and overwhelmed. Now we still have a slob, right? I mean we, you hear cross the board a slob here as well there, no doubt about it. Just the takeaway from this is clarity and consistency is going to win in 2026. There's no question about it. It's just brands have to be smart to that and wake up to it. Yeah, I love that.
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Well, Mark, always great to talk with you and, and hear your, your insights and predictions and you know, we'll, we'll talk again next year and see how all this pans out. But no pun intended. But one last question before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Ah, man, I love that. I stay close to a lot of the customers. I work closely with our client relations team to understand kind of like the triggers of what they're seeing. Those signals. I love staying close to signals. I've surrounded myself with a really talented marketing team that helps me spend time kind of watching some of these discovery patterns across signals and they challenged me to kind of think differently about stuff. You know, when we, when we went and started looking at our model from a business standpoint, global brands, mid to late stage brands. We acquire Blast Media now. Pam Blast. You remember that. You know that kind of ignited emerging growth. So now when we look at a full life cycle growth journey from emerging growth to late stage, that push put a little bit of a different challenge on us. From a brand standpoint, this team is kind of really, really pushing me to think differently on how I connect that growth strategy across some of the signals we're seeing. So staying close to the customers and really surrounding myself with the talented team of the winning factors in my book.
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Love it. Well again I'd like to thank Mark Nardoni, CMO at Pan, for joining the show. You can learn more about Mark and Pan by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack, tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informal, informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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The agile brand.